Mordheim PvP After Action Reports 1

 Mordheim: City of the Damnned is the video game adaptation of the classic tabletop skirmish wargame Mordheim set in the Warhammer Fantasy universe. The video game is an excellent turn-based squad-based tactics game with a punishing difficulty. If you like XCOM, Battle Brothers or Gloomhaven you will feel right at home. If your warband characters get put out of action in combat they may come back with injuries that persist from combat to combat, or even lose their weapons if your opponent has looted them. Some may see this as extremely punishing, but I see this as adding realistic flavor to the mercenary management portion of the game. For the remainder of this post I'll be referring to the video game as Mordheim.

What follows is an After Action Report of some of the PvP games I have played against opponents Ben and Splizwarf.

In my first game, Ben was playing the Undead and I had my plucky Chaos warband.  We started at Rank zero so we only had 5 units each: A Leader, a Hero and three Henchmen (soldiers). Ben picked a Skaven Poison Wind Globadier as his Hero. I picked a Chaos Mutant (gets mutations at level 1, 4 and 7; currently level zero).

In our initial skirmish our armies were nearly adjacent to each other. I foolishly engaged Ben's Ghoul Henchman with my Leader and got surrounded, putting my Leader out of action.  The game desynced and kicked us both off, declaring us both victors ironically.  Still, my leader had to spend five days recovering from his wounds. 

Undaunted I bought a new Magister Leader, Steiner, and engaged Ben again. Ben saw a trio of my Hero and Henchmen outside a gate and charged with his Vampire Leader. I surrounded his Vampire and promptly pummeled him into the dirt.  But then, then came the Skaven Globadier.  Ben expertly threw poison globes into the midst of the victorious trio multiple times over several turns, taking the high ground of a nearby three story house.  My leader finally engaged the dammed Skaven in the top of the house but the damage was already done. The multiple poison strikes from the globes weakened my trio so much that they died to poison spontaneously, really before Ben even needed to engage.  It was like sacrificing your Queen to take out the rest of your opponent's chess pieces. Oh and my leader engaging the Skaven?  He got knifed to death by the slippery dodging Skaven and a Ghoul that snuck up behind him and pummeled him with an axe. 

My Leader Steiner lost an arm from that battle and that is a permanent injury! We may have more battles and shenanigans to come.

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More Mordheim Battle reports. This time, I talk about winning and the morale mechanic.  To win a match in Mordheim you need to either put the entire enemy team out of action or make them run away by failing a morale test. You have a certain amount of morale based on each unit’s Leadership score.  Your Leaders usually have the lion’s share of your team’s morale, so if they go down, it usually takes one or two more casualties for the opponent to force you to take a morale check by reducing your morale below a certain threshold.  Also, each player has a cart which contains a totem.  Steal the totem and you reduce your opponent’s morale by about one casualty.  

In my game against Ben we spawned on a map neither of us was familiar with.  Imagine a square that was an eight-pointed star with standing stones at each of the eight points, encircled by abandoned houses all around the edge.  Ben had to deploy his warband around his cart in the center of the standing stones while I was made to scatter my troops in a wide arc around in the abandoned buildings.  We clashed quickly at two points as the terrain and deployment encouraged us to.  My Magister (Chaos sorcerer who is also my Leader) was engaged by Ben’s Vampire Leader half way up the collapsed roof of some ruined building.  I managed to have a nearby Chaos henchman charge the Vampire from his rear and between my two Chaos units the Vampire was slammed and put out of action. 

The second point of conflict was in a ruined alleyway where wyrdstone and treasure were littered behind one of my henchmen.  Ben’s Ghoul and Skaven Poison Wind Globadier engaged my henchman, who fortunately dodged his best, but his health was still getting dangerously low.  An archer of mine and another Chaos henchman were isolated from the main conflicts so I sent them on a sneaky mission. Dodging and hiding behind the standing stones I stealthily marched them to Ben’s cart in the center of the plaza and quickly stole Ben’s Undead totem.  This, along with the Vampire Leader’s collapse, forced a moral check on Ben’s forces and huzzah they ran away and I was declared victor of the field!

Then there was the clash with Splizwarf’s Skaven.  After one match where Spliz was getting used to the controls, a cat and mouse conflict began where I would occasionally spy a sneaky Skaven some two buildings away from my eager Chaos forces but by the time we got there, the vermin would be gone.  All that was left were ransacked treasure chests and a distinct lack of wyrdstone.  Finally, I found a Stormvermin hiding behind a crumbling wall and was able to successfully execute him in combat. With one rat down I made the mistake of sending my wounded henchman into a building where he was chasing down a Skaven assassin. The Skaven, known for their frequent dodging, crumpled my wounded henchman onto the pavement and then disappeared.  Searching for rats and signs of tails one Chaos fighter turned the corner of a building and was immediately charged by the Skaven leader, his swords dripping with poison.  Dodging nearly all of my desperate strikes, the Skaven warband encircled my units and took them apart one by one. 

Despite the massacre, most of my warband returned to the lair miraculously fully recovered! Such is the power of Chaos.